BR.IEFLY NOTED Pushing Time Away, by Peter Singer (Ecco; $24.95). David Oppenheim was a classical scholar, a member of Freud's inner circle, and a close friend of the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. He was also a victim of the Holocaust, and until his grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, discovered a trove of his letters and writ- ings, his life had been almost completely forgotten. Singer reconstructs that life in fascinating detail. He illuminates the complexities of his grandparents' diffi- cult but success:fiù marriage, evokes the vibrant and disputatious life of ear1y- twentieth-century Vienna, and offers a convincing picture of the intellectual and personal batdes that dominated the early days of psychoanalysis. Singer's moving book, haunted from the beginning by its terrible end, constitutes a revolt against the anonymity of the Holocaust's grim statistics. Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford (Scribner; $24). In 1990, Swofford, a young Ma- rine sniper, went to Saudi Arabia with dreams of vaporizing Iraqi skulls into clouds of "pink mist." As he recounts in this aggressively uninspiring Gulf War memoir, his youthful blood1ustwas never satisfied. After spending months clean- ing sand out of his rifle--so feverish with murderous anticipation that he almost blows a buddy's head off after an argu- ment-Swofford ends up merely a spec- tator of a lopsided battle waged with bombs, not bullets. The rage the sol- diers feel, their hopes of combat frus- trated, is "nearly unendurable." Swof- ford's attempts at brutal honesty some- times seem cartoonish: "Rape them all, kill them all" is how he sums up his mil- itary ethic. He is better at comic descrip- tions-gas masks malfunctioning in the desert heat, camels picked off dur- ing target practice-that capture the stu- pid side of a smart-bomb war. "W. C. Fields, by James Curtis (Knopf; $35). Fields had a big nose, he hated Philadelphia, he bludgeoned swans with a 5-iron, he was almost the wizard in "The Wizard of Oz," he drank himself to death. Everyone knows some tidbit about the beloved screen comedian, but Curtis fluently traces the entire arc of Fields's mess)T, overstuffed life. The de- tails are irresistible: Fields had a knack for the grand gesture (sending an empty limousine to the set as a protest) and the stiletto wisecrack (he called Mae West "a plumber's idea of Cleopatra"). Curtis is inevitably hampered by the difficulty of explaining what can only be experienced: the effect of Fields's com- edy onscreen. Nonetheless, he does an excellent job detailing the meticulous craftsmanshìp and relentless hard work through which Fields, who began his career as a mute juggler in vaudeville, became a comedian renowned for his verbal dexteri The King in the Tree, by Steven Mill- hauser (Knopf; $23). An ingenious geome- ter of love triangles, Millhauser tinkers with tested formulas in these three novel- las, while giving full rein to his taste for the fantastical. Cuckolded King Mark, in a new twist on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, commissions an automaton copy of his banished queen. Don Juan travels to an English country estate, where his playboy instincts run afoul of a quizzical Enlightenment bluestocking. In the weakest of the three novellas, a melodramatic monologue that opens the collection, a bitter widow confronts her late husband's mistress while showing her around their house as a prospective buyer. Yet, no matter how rickety the scenario, Millhauser's shrewd sense of psychology makes his characters' im- pulses toward romantic excess manifestly believable, as when the chivalrous Tris- tan realizes that "if he was going to be- tray at all, then he had to betray as deeply as possible." A custom-made shirt from landsend.com is guaranteed to fit you to a . 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